The Wraithlord stood at the edge of the turret’s effective range, lying far, far beyond any span Angar had wielded Electrokinesis before.

  The turret's maw erupted in a storm of fire, Simo's lancer barking cracks as Angar pounded across the blighted desolation, his legs a blur of churning cybernetics.

  Even as another gargantuan tentacle plummeted like a falling star towards Salvador's crater, Angar's mind strained against reality, his neural webs igniting in a blaze of agonized defiance.

  His will hammered relentlessly at the barriers of what seemed utterly impossible, locked in a silent battle where insidious doubt slithered like venom through his thoughts, and the talons of exhaustion raked deep into his very being, the strain clamping down on both his mind and soul like a molten vise.

  But he crushed those frailties without mercy, grounding them beneath the unyielding heel of his resolve, drawing upon scars pounded into him through endless trials of blood and battle.

  He would not yield. He never yielded. Such limits were nothing more than illusions for lesser men.

  The Unspoken Way burnt hot against his skin, and once again, reality rent. Not graciously. Not willingly. Never willingly. Always shattered under his iron dominion.

  Exhaustion flooded him.

  But the plunging tentacle convulsed mid-descent, twitching as the Wraithlord's massive form writhed under the onslaught of Electrocute's fury, invisible arcs leaping through its profane bulk in a cascade of torment.

  Simo's lancer cracked once again as Angar's Resilience plummeted like a stone into the abyss, forcing the psionic manifestation to continue, the psychic toll terrible, the drain a ravenous void at such distance.

  “Don't let up,” shouted Angar over the comms, his sprint devouring the distance. “Lay the hate until you draw it off.”

  He’d hoped the Eye of Mentality mod triggered for this one, his manifestation not lowering Resilience, but as usual, it didn’t.

  Exhaustion nearly caused Angar’s knees to buckle as the monster shrugged off the psychic attack with a deafening roar that split the thin air, all the crimson eyes peppering its bulk flaring with renewed hatred.

  But the attacks from Garioch and Simo yielded fruit. The Wraithlord pivoted, lumbering towards the battlecycle on its massive tentacle-limbs.

  "Switch out," barked Angar. "Drive, Saint Garioch. Keep moving, keep evading, and keep your distance. Man the turret, Simo, but use Snipe on cooldown. I'm striking its left, so mind your fire."

  Fatigue dampened Angar’s mind in a smothering fog, making him question whether to risk another Electrocute, no matter the peril.

  He flashed open his Annals, glancing at his Resilience, unease coiling in his gut. The modified score hovered at 51, a precarious thread. He couldn’t risk further psionic manifestations.

  The fiend unleashed a wide beam of searing green energy that ripped across the plain.

  Angar twisted his neck to peer back at his companions, watching in tense relief as the beam carved a deep, scorched furrow into the earth right where they had been moments before, but the battlecycle had already blazed forward, slewing aside in a plume of ash.

  "Don't be foolish," Garioch's voice crackled through the comms, edged with grim concern. "I sent an emergency hail. We'll lure it away. You extract Sal. When a window opens and allows it, I'll swing around and haul you both clear."

  There wasn’t time to explain or convince.

  Garioch's melee focus had narrowed his chapter options from the start. Angar had dismissed the unfit ones in his mind, ruled out some others, and honed in on the sigil that must once have blazoned the Saint's upper-right breastplate.

  To forestall debate, he invoked that chapter’s creed. "Atone in flames. Get Salvador, then get out."

  Almost all who pledged to the Penitent Flame chapter had committed a grave sin and sought absolution in the purifying inferno of Holy War, often seeking martyrdom.

  To utter the motto was to command all to stand aside from the path toward redemption, to let happen what must be done.

  A protracted silence stretched before Garioch's reply grated forth. "Atone in flames, brother."

  Angar performed the sign of the trey as he sprinted, offering up a silent prayer. When Ground Current could span the distance, Angar dissolved into a maelstrom of ionized rage, erupting anew beside the Wraithlord in a thunderous rebirth of crackling electricity.

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  Lightning forked from the bloodied sky as he channeled an Energy Point into his hammer's haft, the weapon humming with pent fury, ready to wage war upon the titan that had felled a Seraph.

  Before he could bring the hammer crashing down, the colossus nearly barreled over him like an ant underfoot, its writhing mass blotting out the bruised sky as it surged forward with ruthless inevitability.

  Angar twisted aside, his cybernetic legs whining in protest as he hopped back canted, veering more to the beast's left flank, his maul whipping out in a desperate arc to intercept a lashing tendril that shot toward him like a barbed harpoon.

  The graviton pulse detonated on impact, a vortex of plasmatic fury that shredded the appendage in a spray of molten ichor and splintered bone, hurling it away in ragged tatters.

  But the Wraithlord paid it no mind, its thunderous charge unrelenting as it steamrolled past, the thicker tentacles it used for locomotion slamming into the ashen earth behind him with ground-shaking booms, each impact birthing craters that spewed dust and embers like wounds in this tortured world.

  Angar invoked Lightning Strike in a flicker of will, the shimmering aegis cloaking him in crackling ether as he channeled an Energy Point into his maul's haft once more.

  The weapon thrummed, a conduit for his fury, and he struck at the base of one of the titan's thick tentacles, a colossal pillar of fused nightmare, armored in scales and bone that pulsed with infernal veins.

  Lightning ripped down, slamming into the limb even as the graviton core warped the air in a plasmatic eruption.

  Shards of bone-scale exploded outward like shrapnel, raining down in stinging pelts that hissed against the blighted plain, but it did little real damage to the limb, and the reprisal was swift and merciless.

  Half a dozen lesser tendrils erupted from the Wraithlord's bulk, coiling toward him with serpentine malice, their flaming barbs spitting embers that scorched the air.

  Angar batted a few aside with savage swipes of his gauntlet and hammer, the impacts ringing through his form, but the others slithered past his guard, wrapping around his armor with crushing tenacity, their grips tightening like a noose.

  A half dozen more joined the fray, ensnaring him in a writhing cocoon of unholy flesh, dragging him along in the monster's wake as it lumbered toward the battlecycle.

  The whispers clawed at his mind now, a screaming chorus of merged voices promising oblivion and ecstasy in equal measure, but Angar wrenched his left arm free with a grunt of iron will, seizing the hilt of his maul.

  He spun then, invoking Tempest in a whirlwind of Holy wrath, his body becoming a cyclone of destruction as the hammer thudded into the clump of tendrils, their slack coiling around him like chains.

  Before the spin could tear him free or rip the appendages from the Wraithlord's hide, a tentacle thick as an ancient tree-trunk bashed into him from behind, a battering ram of profane might that sent him hurtling into the creature's bulk.

  Not against it, but into it.

  His maul and both arms punched through the rippling surface in a slurping breach, Tempest's residual pull straining futilely to continue the whirl, but finding no yield in the sick flesh.

  His helm pressed flush against the beast's hide, the visor fogging with the fetid reek that seeped through his filters.

  He shoved his head down just in time to glimpse the severed tendrils slithering away from his frame, coiling limply as they fell away.

  Though he couldn't see it directly, he felt the lightning arcing from his embedded weapon, stretching outward in a crackling stream. Through the puncture, he saw the flashes illuminating the gloom within, searing into the creature's innards.

  Planting his tripod-feet against the grotesque hide, Angar heaved with all his enhanced might, trying to wrench his arms and maul free, to resume the sacred spin.

  But before he could summon the leverage, something immense smashed into his back, driving him deeper inside with a devastating impact.

  His head rocked violently, his skull knocking against the confines of his oversized new helm, sending stars exploding in his vision like fireworks.

  He shook off the daze through sheer resolve alone, forcing his sight to steady amid the haze, seeing all the red warnings flash in his HUD.

  His armor snagged and grated as he shifted, the telltale grind of a crack and fractures along his backplate.

  Tempest's 90% damage mitigation had been his salvation, a fleeting grace that kept him whole and breathing. Without it, he'd be a smear of sanctified gore, lost in this infernal womb.

  He wasn't buried deep, but ensconced in a mucus-slick cavity of bone and shadow, a disgusting chamber that shuddered along with the Wraithlord.

  It wasn't a true skeletal frame, no orderly vault of ribs and spine like some mortal beast.

  Instead, the innards formed a honeycomb of cavities, each oozing with viscous slime that dripped and clung like phlegm, interconnected by tunnels of writhing tissue, the walls throbbing like a fevered heartbeat against his armor.

  Angar scanned the dim confines, hunting for a vulnerability, hoping to spot a throbbing organ, a pulsating brain, an infernal heart to shatter.

  But there was nothing. Only more cavities mirroring his own, just empty voids of profanity where logic and biology held no sway.

  Through the myriad eyes and mouths studding its hide, he could glimpse the outside world, the fractured plain blurring past as the titan charged.

  Exhaustion clawed at him relentlessly, like a leaden weight seeping into his limbs, his mind fogged beyond reason.

  He forced it all away with a growl, refusing to be affected as if he were a lesser man, but even as he did, a dark pressure bore down on his skull like grave sins on a soul.

  And in that moment, the whispers intensified around the edges of his thoughts, slithering through the cracks in his mental defenses with insidious ease, each voice promising him a swift release from the pain, even as others crooned the sweeter lure of madness.

  He had his pistol and four explosives in his belt, though little room to maneuver in this stinking pit, but if he could hurl them into the dark spots he couldn’t make out, perhaps blast something vital, he could do some real damage to this unholy thing.

  As he twisted awkwardly in the confined space, reaching for an explosive, some instinct told him to turn. He craned to peer at the puncture wound his entry had made, a ragged tear oozing ichor.

  And he turned just in time to see silent tendrils slithering inward, probing like blind worms scenting prey, their barbs flickering with hellish flame.

  He aimed at the cavity's floor, right near the entrance breach, and unleashed Lightning Bolt with a surge of will.

  Crackling electricity erupted from his gauntlet, fanning outward in a sixty-degree cone of unbridled devastation that engulfed the gaping wound, searing the invading appendages in a storm of blue-yellow fury.